Jan 20
I read a thought somewhere
A thought I thought myself
Someone thought it long ago
Now it sits on my book shelf.
I heard a song on the radio
Made from the tears I shed
Someone wrote it far away
Now it’s stuck in my head.
We are made of the same stuff
You and I
Flesh, blood, tears, sighs
Pain, love, fear, lies.
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Feb 26
I haven’t written anything I want to read.
I want my words to become a language on their own, to dance before your eyes, to sing to you in the silence.
I haven’t written anything I want to read.
I want my words to sketch characters in your mind, to fill your nights with colorful dreams, to show you sparks on a bright day.
I want my words to be yours when you lose your own, to say what’s true when you’re in doubt, to be with you when I can’t.
I haven’t written anything I want you to read.
Nov 5
Oct 12
The oasis of thoughts is running dry
Unkind is the trajectory of time
Between dreaming and doing
Imagination has sketched a fine line.
Sep 15
Poetry can truly transcend time and geography, and make you believe in the equivalent of a fairy tale for adults; a kind of serene, beautiful existence where words can smell, touch, smile and cry.
The Street: Octavio Paz
A long and silent street.
I walk in blackness and I stumble and fall
and rise, and I walk blind, my feet
stepping on silent stones and dry leaves.
Someone behind me also stepping on stones, leaves:
if I slow down, he slows:
if I run, he runs. I turn: nobody.
Everything dark and doorless.
Turning and turning among these corners
which lead forever to the street
where I pursue a man who stumbles
and rises and says when he sees me: nobody
Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath
"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The Saddest Poem: Pablo Neruda
Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example,'The night is shattered and the blue stars shiver in the distance.' The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. Through nights like this one I held her in my arms I kissed her again and again under the endless sky. She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too. How could one not have loved her great still eyes. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her. To hear the immense night, still more immense without her. And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture. What does it matter that my love could not keep her. The night is shattered and she is not with me. This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance. My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her. My sight searches for her as though to go to her. My heart looks for her, and she is not with me. The same night whitening the same trees. We, of that time, are no longer the same. I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her. My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing. Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before. Her voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes. I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long. Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms my sould is not satisfied that it has lost her. Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her.
[Original: La Poesia]
Aug 13
The blogosphere, it seems, it steadily disintegrating itself from my life. I crave to get my blogging and blog-stalking hours back. Damn inefficient time management in life outside of work, as though it doesn’t flaunt its ugly head all day anyway. I’m 3 weeks old in the working world, not yet neck-deep in work, and already begging for an extension in my 24-hour days. Slow down time, prithee.
If I write any more in this brain-dead state, this post will be nothing short of a rant. So here goes, one of few those chain mail poems that I still remember and find very apt at this point:
Have you ever watched kids
On a merry-go-round?
Or listened to the rain
Slapping on the ground?
Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight?
Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?
You better slow down
Don’t dance so fast
Time is short
The music won’t last.
Do you run through each day
On the fly?
When you ask How are you,
Do you hear the reply?
When the day is done,
Do you lie in your bed
With the next hundred chores
Running through your head?
You’d better slow down
Don’t dance so fast
Time is short
The music won’t last.
Ever told your child,
We’ll do it tomorrow?
And in your haste,
Not see his sorrow?
Ever lost touch,
Let a good friendship die
Cause you never had time
To call and say,’Hi’ ?
You’d better slow down.
Don’t dance so fast.
Time is short.
The music won’t last.
When you run so fast to get somewhere
You miss half the fun of getting there.
When you worry and hurry through your day,
It is like an unopened gift,
Thrown away.
Life is not a race
Do take it slower
Hear the music
Before the song is over.
Jul 2
While reading The Motorycle Diaries, I came across this hauntingly beautiful poem written by Otero Silva, a Venezuelan poet and novelist born in 1908:
I heard splashing on the boat
her bare feet
And sensed in our faces
the hungry dusk
My heart swaying between her
and the street, the road
I don’t know where I found the strength
to free myself from her eyes
to slip from her arms
She stayed, crying through rain and glass
clouded with grief and tears
She stayed, unable to cry
Wait! I will come
walking with you.
Apr 3
This happened in the summer of 2007, when all I wanted to do was lie under the mango tree in the backyard of my house, and make patterns in my head by tracing out the blue of the sky and the white of the clouds, visible through the small peep-holes made by the leaves of the mango tree. It was still a fortnight and a rain shower before the first batch of mangos would be magically transformed from raw green to the color of the sun whose rays they bathed in day after day.
It wasn’t a particularly hot or dry summer. I spent many an evening sprawling under the voluminous mango tree, listening to the evening cries of birds that nested in my backyard, watching the leaves dance in the occasional breeze, toying with infinite thoughts about our universe. On one such daily dates with nature, when the birds hadn’t yet started chirping, the silence of the evening was broken by my pet dog howling in the distance. His pitch would rise and fall, but his head remained turned upward towards the sky. You probably know the myths that associate dogs crying with spirits floating in the sky. Not that I believed any of them.
I drifted back to reality and yelled out his name, wondering what he saw up there that I couldn’t see. I barely had time to consider, for he was right beside me, violently digging up the ground. Now, if you have been around dogs, you’d know they do that kind of a thing; they dig, sometimes for no apparent reason. I decided to ignore the digging as I watched the sun slowly wrap up for the day, a sight that has never ceased to capture me.
What happened next is why I remember those days so vividly. It turned out that my dog had been digging so conscientiously in that particular spot for a reason, a treasure of sorts. I remember observing him under the last traces of daylight, digging relentlessly. He suddenly stopped and ran out of the backyard, leaving me alone in the looming dark, with a pit as deep as an arm, and something shiny inside it. Somewhere near the main entrance of the house, he began howling again, as though reporting the completion of his task. He was joined by several others, all crying at variable pitches, while a shiver passed through me as I looked upon the shine in the dark and thought about all their faces fixed towards the dark sky.
The shiny object buried and recovered from the earth in my backyard, was a piece of paper. I can’t say how it got there or how my dog found it, but there it sat, waiting to be read. It’s lines are etched in my head, and I still shudder to think of the interpretations.
“In passing by this land I lie
Upon the dark earth about me
The flesh, the blood.”
Mar 19
She walks the lone road,
Silence stinging her senses
Like a cold wind would sting
Her bare skin,
But the night is still
And dark, and the sky is dark,
Embracing the dainty arch
Of the new born moon,
As though it were created to protect
The moon alone, and nothing below,
And no stars shone
Upon the silence of the night.
She walks past a house masked
By dull peeling white, the smell
Of rust, and autumn in sight
In a garden, brown and bare.
She walks through the night
Till she reaches the end
Of her road, the end of all life,
And peers through the sky above
At the morning light, at the first rays
Of the rising sun.
A new horizon?
Dec 6
Somewhere up above
Beyond the clouds, the stars, the skies
Somewhere up above
A magnificient creation lies
All-knowing, all-powerful, forgiving and fair
In the human mind
The darkness is protected by the blue
With infinite imagination.
I quit my corporate job in the summer of 2011 and decided to travel for a living. My wanderlust has taken me to 15 countries across 3 continents. I'm currently discovering the shores of my own country, India. My travel stories have appeared in The Times of India, The Hindu & The Huffington Post, among others. I was recently featured as an intrepid woman traveller in the New Woman Magazine & interviewed on All India Radio.
In January 2012, I co-founded India Untravelled, with an aim to introduce travel enthusiasts to responsible travel experiences in rural India.
Contact me at shivyanath@gmail.com or on Twitter @shivya.
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